[chipsy]

W/R to "What If's", I think the big one is "What If Atari Were Stronger/More Focused". They tried to grow into a "manufacturing conglomerate" rather than a "consumer design" company. It misused their original branding and culture. For this the Warner acquisition deserves a large share of the blame, even as it seemed necessary for financing the VCS launch. Either way, by the time the company was at its most profitable, it was already rotten from mismanagement.

Had they found a path towards a more contemporary-Apple-like management style, and some foresight for the third-party situation and the console lifecycle, they would have broken away from the scattershot focus, released a good, DRM-protected, backwards-compatible update to the VCS in the early 80's instead of the half-baked 5200/7800 efforts, insulated themselves from the arcade crash with original console software, and starved Nintendo's air supply at retail.

They might have even still released computers, just of a different sort - perhaps they would have kept Jay Miner's team and had an Atari-branded Amiga, with a console version released soon after(c. 1985-86) instead of 8 years later(CD32 - 1993).